writch's wramblings

Milia

2010-03-10T18:40:48Z

That's what they are called (hard little white bumps in your skin).

That's what's being ejected from me, too. When the skin all boils and stuff, the cabbage looking chunks that come out are bumps and sheets of milia.

5 Reasons Little White Bumps Are On Your Face and How to Get Rid ...

Grrl Power!

2010-03-07T20:11:45Z

Nah, that's bass-ackwards

2010-03-07T19:21:15Z

If the Aussies are seeing the high tide during the day in their Summer (our Winter), then it's Sagittarius that it's in.

I was off ...

2010-03-07T17:36:21Z

Yeah, it looks like our sun's twin is in Gemini right now (poetic, eh?). It's probably a brown dwarf, since we've never noticed it. This year's 'king tide' is projected to be July 11th.

TRADITIONAL ASTROLOGICAL DATES			ACTUAL ASTRONOMICAL DATES TODAY (c. 2000 C.E.)
Constellation	Date Span	Days	Constellation	Date Span	Days
Aries	21 Mar - 19 Apr	30	Aries	19 Apr - 13 May	25
Taurus	20 Apr - 20 May	31	Taurus	14 May - 19 Jun	37
Gemini	21 May - 20 Jun	31	Gemini	20 Jun - 20 Jul	31
Cancer	21 Jun - 22 Jul	32	Cancer	21 Jul - 9 Aug	20
Leo	23 Jul - 22 Aug	31	Leo	10 Aug - 15 Sep	37
Virgo	23 Aug - 22 Sep	31	Virgo	16 Sep - 30 Oct	45
Libra	23 Sep - 22 Oct	30	Libra	31 Oct - 22 Nov	23
Scorpio	23 Oct - 21 Nov	30	Scorpius	23 Nov - 29 Nov	7
			Ophiuchus	30 Nov - 17 Dec	18
Sagittarius	22 Nov - 21 Dec	30	Sagittarius	18 Dec - 18 Jan	32
Capricorn	22 Dec - 19 Jan	29	Capricornus	19 Jan - 15 Feb	28
Aquarius	20 Jan - 18 Feb	30	Aquarius	16 Feb - 3/11	24-25
Pisces	19 Feb - 20 Mar	30-31	Pisces	12 Mar - 18 Apr	38

The Current Civil Rights Issue ...

2010-03-07T16:28:11Z

... is more problematic than the last.

For example, during the racial segregation period, when miscegenation was a crime, one could be in favor of interracial marriage w/o being mistaken as a participant.

On the other hand, a single man in northern California who advocates gay marriage ...

I'd Forgotten This One

2010-03-07T16:26:00Z

Close your eyes, give me your hand, darling
Do you feel my heart beating, do you understand?
Do you feel the same, am I only dreaming?
Is this burning an eternal flame?

I believe it's meant to be, darling
I watch when you are sleeping, you belong to me
Do you feel the same, am I only dreaming
Or is this burning an eternal flame?

Say my name, sun shines through the rain
A whole life so lonely, and then you come and ease the pain
I don't want to lose this feeling

[break]

Say my name, sun shines through the rain
A whole life so lonely, and then you come and ease the pain
I don't want to lose this feeling

Close your eyes and give me your hand
Do you feel my heart beating, do you understand?
Do you feel the same, am I only dreaming
Or is this burning an eternal flame?

[break]

Is this burning an eternal flame?

An eternal flame?

(Close your eyes and give me your hand
Do you feel my heart beating, do you understand?
Do you feel the same, am I only dreaming
Or is this burning an eternal flame?)

I Realized Something Today, Perhaps Significant

2010-03-07T02:52:44Z

And I wrote to the Binary Research Institute as a result.

You see, I was researching sea levels, because I figured if the world really was a lot warmer in Roman times the ocean level would have been higher, too.

In any case, I came across this little tidbit regarding "King Tides":

On Australia's East Coast, the highest tides occur during the winter months of June, July and August, and the summer months of December, January and February. The highest of each of these periods (i.e., one in winter and one in summer, totaling two per year) are known as the king tides.

Now, that's intriguing, until you note the follow-up:

The winter king tide usually occurs at night and therefore goes unnoticed. Consequently the summer king tide usually catches the most attention. On such days the surf is particularly dangerous -- tall waves, long clean breaks, strong rips, consistent sets: ideal for surfing, but seductive and dangerous for inexperienced swimmers.

You see, it's pointing at the companion. The companion is likely near/in Cancer/Leo right now.

Once we subtract the moon's influence from a large data set (historical tide charts), we'll have a much clearer clue.

That was the suggestion I sent to BRI.

A New Type of 'Virus'

2010-03-06T01:00:12Z

I just had the most devious thought.

On a machine with a wireless card, you create a PXE Boot server (a machine that hands out boot-up instructions) that has a splash screen that looks like Windows startup, and a config script that echos everything into /dev/null (so as to not mar the pretty graphic splash screen) while remastering their hard disk to be a splendid SuSE 11, Ubutnu, Fedora, or whatever machine.

Then you go downtown, or the airport, or such, and wait for people who don't have PXEBoot turned off to boot up their laptops and make them into linux laptops.

Reefer Head Wins!

2010-03-04T16:17:40Z

Brian Bakri's depiction of the chemtrail conspiracy theory wins! Bakri is awarded $50 in gift certificates to Rasoi Indian Kitchen and two free passes to Guild Cinema.

I've Got Some SERIOUS Relatives in My Family

2010-03-04T14:10:48Z

For Carlos Pollo

2010-03-04T01:48:56Z

He mentioned liking seeing the fog rolling over the mountains. Here's some through fresh pear blossoms.

One of the better versions

2010-03-03T15:23:16Z

There are better stage productions, but this one seems to have the best audio, and a decent cast (even if they are squashed up onto a tiny stage, as is often the case with this production).

It's got some of the best puns in it I'd heard in a long time.

Over The Top

2010-03-03T14:58:30Z

Howard Crabtree's "When Pigs Fly" is one of the better musicals (in general) I've run across. It's witty and well written, and it's terribly funny (at least the version I saw presented in Albuquerque). In any case, I've looked for lyrics to the grand finale for some years, and though I remembered the CD had a fat booklet, even it didn't have them. So I typed them in by hand:

Over the Top

by Howard Crabtree

There's a place I've dreamed about

like paradise, but farther out.

How to get there, who can say?

There's no map to show the way.

It's waiting somewhere off the scale,

around the bend, beyond the pale

Over the top,

I want to go over the top.

I'm ready to pack up and move

to the place I can prove

I don't know when to stop.

I'm gonna stake my claim

where it's never the 'same old, same old'.

Should I just stay put,

and paint by numbers?

Don't insult me, catapult me ...

Over the top.

I want to be more than ok.

I want to relocate my base

to that magical place

I can go all the way.

I'll build my castle in the air,

and that's where I'll set up shop,

when I'm o-o-o-o-o-over the top.

I want to find the spot

where all that you've got is accepted.

Will the compromisers overtake me?

They can't lick me, just drop-kick me ...

Over the top.

I want to be one of a kind.

I want to create a display

that makes everyone say

that I'm out of my mind.

When you give your all to just one dream

make sure it's the cream of the crop!

Take it o-o-o-o-o-over the top!

Tensegrity

2010-03-02T17:55:00Z

Lovely word. It's the name for all those weird little shapes made out of sticks and string.

I looked it up because I'm working on yet another Object Oriented Relational Database.

Now, the idea of a Relational Database (RDB) is that you keep just one of everything, in it's own table, and you join the tables to make sense of things. So, in a table about things you can do, you'll have an index number for every 'thing' and every 'do'. The name of the thing will be in another table (with it's index number), as will the name of the 'do' items.

With Object Oriented programming, you make 'instances' of things that can make other 'instances' of things that point at each other and such.

When I realized it, I had to look it up. The whole concept is just like building a tensegrity sphere.

For the longest time, it looks like a pile of sticks and strings. Then, when everything gets taut, it finally looks like a ball.

Cloud nine (Tensegrity sphere)

2010-03-02T17:54:21Z

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cloud nines are airborne habitats first proposed by Buckminster Fuller. Fuller proposed that giant geodesic spheres might be made to levitate by heating the air inside.

Geodesic spheres (structures of triangular components arranged to make a sphere) become stronger as they become bigger, due to how they distribute stress over their surfaces. Because of this, they may be imagined on colossal scales.

As a sphere gets bigger, the volume it encloses grows much faster than the mass of the enclosing structure itself. Fuller suggested that the mass of a mile-wide geodesic sphere would be negligible compared to the mass of the air trapped within it. He suggested that if the air inside such a sphere were heated even by one degree higher than the ambient temperature of its surroundings, the sphere could become airborne. He calculated that such a balloon could lift a considerable mass, and hence that 'mini-cities' or airborne towns of thousands of people could be built in this way. These 'cloud nines' could be tethered, or free-floating, or perhaps maneuverable so that they could 'migrate' in response to climatic and environmental conditions.